But my point here is not to produce another piece of quit lit. Rather, I want to add some historical depth to our sense of the chronic problems that academic anthropologists face. Anthropology, perhaps more than any other social science, has been deeply affected by the baby boom. Even today, we still live in a world where senior professors imagine there are as many job openings now as there were in 1965. We need a more expansive imagination of the challenges anthropologists have faced over the years. And, most importantly, we need to remember that there are many successful, happy survivors. 

I open this series with a selection from Cannibalism Is an Acquired Taste, a biography of Omer Stewart pieced together from his letters and interviews with him over the years. The book is far, far more delightful than I had thought it would be. Stewart was a blue collar country kid from Utah who created the anthropology department at the University of Colorado Boulder, fought for Indian rights to use peyote in religious ceremony, and won the Malinowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology to boot. I really recommend the book — it’s a gem.

At any rate, Stewart decided that he wanted to be an anthropologist after taking courses with Julian Steward in the early 1930s. Stewart was not a big fan of Steward, but loved the work. So in 1933 he wrote to Alfred Kroeber about the possibility of doing a Ph.D. at Berkeley. Kroeber’s response is a model of transparency that anticipated Karen Kelsky’s great work by almost half a century. Here is what he wrote:

Dear Mr. Stewart:
I enclose a statement which I have drawn up to meet inquiries like yours. If after reading it you still want to persist, I think we should get farthest if you would first tell me why.
I may add that you would have practically no chance of looking forward to any support, at least during your first year. All that the University has is a limited number of open fellowships, for which hundreds of people apply, most of them with from one to three years of graduate work. The Department has one teaching fellowship and a few small readerships on an hourly basis, but you will realize that with fifteen graduate students and more than that number of undergraduate majors here, the chance of any outsider securing these small pickings must necessarily be about nil in competition with the people who have ad the specific courses in which the readerships are allotted.

I am sorry to be so discouraging, but the truth seems to require it.

Sincerely yours,
A.L. Kroeber

Along with this letter was another form letter that, apparently, Kroeber sent to all prospies:

Study for a Career in Anthropology

Since the depression there has been a great increase in the number of people considering a career in anthropology. The following are some points that bear on this possibility.

At the close of 1932 there are absolutely no jobs open to newcomers, and a number of men of established repute and career have had their positions abolished. At the six principal universities giving thorough training in anthropology, there are at present at least one hundred students actually candidates for the Ph.D. or engaged in graduate studies preliminary to becoming candidates. When the Depression lifts, it is expectable that the renewed or new openings will be followed first by the older men now without a position, and next from these one hundred or so people who will by that time presumably have completed their training. Inasmuch as there were probably not over two hundred positions of any sort in anthropology in the country before the Depression, it is clear that the competition for getting even a foothold in the profession is going to be extremely keen among those who have already begun their preparation. Only the best of luckiest of them can reasonably hope to secure a position.

Anthropology differs from most other University subjects in that it is not taught at all in high school, very rarely in junior college or in fact any kind of college, and not by all major universities even. Cornell and Princeton, for instance, and the Ohio and Indiana State Universities, do not give the subject any representation. The result is two-fold: first, the number of positions is definitely limited; and second, nothing but the full professional training for a Ph.D. is ordinarily of much value for securing a university position. An M.A. is ordinarily without practical value. The few research institutions and larger museums which maintain anthropologists on their staffs make the same requirements as the universities.

There are a good many smaller museums which often contain some anthropological material along with collections in natural history, local history, or art. These sometimes have afforded positions to anthropologists; but many of them are one-man institutions, which call for care and exhibition of specimens, lectures to classes of school children, etc., rather than providing a genuine anthropological career. Also in most cases these museums make no educational requirement beyond perhaps a college degree, so the // positions in them are more often awarded on the basis of some local connection than because of attainment.

A Ph.D. at any first-rate University normally requires three solid years of work after the A.B. If it is necessary for the student to support himself during this period, so that he has only part time available for study, he should reckon on four or five years. At the University of California there is the further requirement that before the student can enter the graduate courses which count toward the doctorate he must have had twelve units of straight anthropology as an undergraduate. Students coming from universities where anthropology is not taught, have therefore to add a semester for making up undergraduate arrears in this respect. In addition they must pass a test showing that they posses an actual reading knowledge of both French and German (no substitutions permitted) before they are eligible to enter graduate courses. This test is one of actual capacity, and is not influenced by consideration of courses taken in these languages.

The above remarks apply primarily to men. On account of the preference which most institutions give to men in filling positions, a woman’s chances are on the average perhaps only one-third as great as those of a man of equal ability.
A.L. Kroeber

Sorry for typos. This is just me typing the text in.

It’s a fascinating document, which mixes transparency (including about sexism), degree requirements, and a come-hither are-you-the-chosen-one kind of feel. One thing is for sure: Time to degree has lengthened.

The important thing to take away was that Stewart went to Berkeley anyway. It only cost seventy five bucks a semester, which he could afford while working for a quarter an hour washing dishes in a nearby restaurant. He even passed his German language proficiency test, after hiring Paul Radin as a tutor. And although he couldn’t have known it in 1933, when he was discharged from the army after the war and on the job market, he was walked into an expanding higher ed sector with more money flowing through it than anyone ever thought possible.

Financially, chances are anthropology in 2030 will look more like anthropology in 1930 than anthropology in 1959. So I wouldn’t really encourage you to take out student loans in anticipation of a second golden age. But it is interesting to see how those who came before us dealt with the fact that, in general, grad school has always sucked.

Ryan Anderson: So I just finished grad school, and I’m focusing on publishing some articles. I remember a while back you mentioned that you want to commit to publishing all Open Access (OA) articles, and I am right there with you. I think it’s important to push OA forward through our own work. Have you started looking into this?

Jeremy Trombley: OA is always in my mind, but I haven’t had the opportunity to publish too much yet so it hasn’t been a major issue. I have one co-authored with my advisor in a journal called Estuaries and Coasts, which has the option of publishing OA. But now I’m in the process of writing three(!) articles, and I’m thinking about where to publish them — if I ever get around to finishing them.

So that’s where I’m at, I guess. I think it’s a real challenge as a grad student trying to get publications so that I can get noticed so that I can maybe — if the stars align, and I pick the right lotto numbers, and my I Ching comes out well — get a job when I graduate. At the same time, I’m increasingly wondering if I should even bother with academia or focus on learning skills that might be useful in the “real world” — which I want to do anyway, but it’s hard to balance with all the writing, reading, etc. I have to do otherwise.

RA: I hear that. I spent so much time with anthropologies and Savage Minds during graduate school that I didn’t make much time for publishing in journals. I did have the chance to be the co-author with Jason Jackson on a piece about open access for Cultural Anthropology, which was a great learning experience. Looking back though, I’m actually glad I took the route I did, because being so active with blogging really shaped my thinking and engagement with anthropology. It was a vital part of what I learned and what anthropology came to mean for me. Being connected to all of the people on the Open Anthropology Cooperative and here at Savage Minds really shifted anthropology around for me. I wasn’t just talking to people in my seminars, I was also getting into conversations, debates, and arguments with people all around the world about everything from the role of anthropologists in war to this Open Access business. It was great, really. I think I was so hooked on the anthro blogosphere and all of this online activity because it connected me to these wider conversations and issues that I would never have experienced otherwise. It opened things up for me. Made me rehink a lot of what I was doing.

I did all of that despite all of the pressure to publish in journals and other official venues. For me, the timing wasn’t right to try to send something to a journal at that time, since I still needed to finish my research. The pressure to publish is insane, if you ask me. I’m all for publishing and I think it’s a vital part of what we do — but I think the overarching political economy of academia has seriously warped the publishing process. Sometimes I feel it’s all so overwhelming that we’re all scrambling trying to just get something accepted to satisfy the beast. This is especially the case for grad students and recent PhDs. We’re freaking out about publishing, because, you know, it’s impossible to get considered for jobs without publications. Everyone knows this. But, if you think about it, what’s the point of that in the long run? I’m not sure it bodes well when the primary motive is keeping up with market demands and competition. Somewhere in all of this the actual point of publishing — sharing ideas and knowledge — gets lost, if not outright abandoned.

And then there’s the job thing. The market is pretty grim, just like pretty much every article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed I read in grad school said it would be. It’s fun to get to this point and realize, hey, well, at least now I know Sarah Kendzior and Karen Kelsky weren’t kidding. I’m being sarcastic, but none of this is actually funny.

I’m not banking on a job in academia. Who knows what will happen? I’m trying, but I feel like I have to look beyond the academy as well. Cast a wide net and all that. Be creative, keep an open mind. That means I have to think carefully about where I focus my time and energy. I know what you mean about the difficulties of trying to balance writing with everything else. There’s the pressure of picking up skills and experience in the so-called real world, and then there’s all the time and energy that’s required to move through the ranks of academia. It’s a total catch-22 situation.

JT: It certainly seems as though the OA issue, and publishing generally is bound up with all of the issues we’ve talked about in the past so that you can’t really fix one without seriously considering and working on the others: the issue of jobs, funding, and debt; the issue of broader relevance outside of academia; even the issue of diversity since publishers and editors are, in a lot of ways, gatekeepers determining who gets published where, which is an essential part of who gets hired where. It’s not to say that OA solves all of those problems, but that addressing access will require addressing those problems and addressing those problems requires, in part, addressing the issue of access. That’s why the OA is important, but also why it’s so difficult.

After I said I would avoid publishing in non-OA journals, a number of issues have come to mind. First, there’s the issue of co-authoring. So much of what we do as graduate students is co-author with advisors — these are generally our first experiences with academic publishing — and we often don’t get a say in what journals we write for as co-authors. There is a degree of recalcitrance — justified, I think — on the part of some established faculty members with respect to OA. They are concerned about the quality of the publications, the notoriety or ranking of the publication, and other very practical concerns — particularly for early career academics. So much hinges, not just on getting published, but getting published in the right journals. It affects our job prospects, tenure, promotions, etc. This is another issue I’ve been thinking a lot about, and it seems that most of the OA journals out there now don’t have the status of the more traditional journals. I think that is changing with HAU and now Cultural Anthropology going OA, but the field is limited and the competition is intense.

Anyway, I don’t think OA will be the solution to all of this. But I think it is part of the process of figuring out a solution. I am also encouraged by many of the para-academic experiments I see around.

That’s a lot to process, and only scratches the surface, of course, but I’d like to hear what you think. I suppose an important question is this: If we agree that OA is an important part of fixing these broader academic problems, how do we promote it? How do we make it so that publishing in OA journals is a good, and viable option for established anthropologists who can afford to take the risk, but also for early career anthropologists, or minority anthropologists who need to work especially hard to be noticed?

RA: There’s the big question. In order to address the problems you mention — and I agree with you that this is about much more than just publishing — Open Access has to work. It has to draw excellent submissions, just as much as it has to pull in readers. I think Hau is doing things right. Hau works. Museum Anthropology Review is another excellent example. Cultural Anthropology is right in there. All of these are good models. But then, all of them also completely replicate traditional journals, and I often wonder if the solution — or, at least, another part of the solution — might be something very different, far more open. We really cling to this model in which we want to see articles posted under the banner of one particular journal or another with a big name, all sanctioned by peer review. Maybe we need something else entirely. I am also concerned about the connection between publishing, status, and getting jobs. In my view one of the goals of open access publishing is to break down some of the hierarchies that permeate academia.

But there’s another issue you brought up earlier — there actually aren’t that many choices when it comes to Open Access in anthropology. There are some, and Matt Thompson here at Savage Minds recently compiled a list. But I don’t think it’s enough to sustain a massive shift. There are a few good venues that I know about out there, but then the herd sort of thins out and it’s hard to tell which ones are running strong and which are, sorry for the extended analogy, infected with some sort of malady and destined for failure. In short, I think we need more places to take our work. But the other issue is that these venues also have to have the infrastructure in place to actually curate this work for the long haul. As Tim Elfenbein reminded me a while back, that’s no small issue. But then, I don’t think that should completely determine how we think about all of this.

In my case I was planning on sticking with all open access publishing, but I’m not sure if that’s actually viable. But maybe that’s just the issue — at what point do we all decide it’s time to really make this work? How will it ever be possible to make a dramatic change if all of us just keep milling around in the lobby waiting for someone else to start the show? Maybe now is the time. And this is where I think your question about “promotion” comes into it, and that may be a matter of finding, sharing, and building upon a core collection of discipline-specific OA venues so that more and more people not only publish OA, but also read it. Maybe part of the solution is changing what we think of as the “right” venue?

JT: I remember something Zizek said in response to Picketty’s Capital. He said that Picketty has it right, but that, if we were to reach a point where the people in power would accept the kind of equality-based measures that Picketty was proposing, then we would have already won. In other words, the structural changes that would be required for them to accept those kinds of policies are the real challenge. Now, you can agree with Zizek or not, but I think something similar may be true for academia and open access. The structural changes that would be required for really good open access to take hold would themselves manifest many of the changes we are seeking through open access. Again, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t pursue open access within the current academic system, but that we can’t expect the high quality open access that we want until some of those broader issues have been addressed. As a result, the push for open access means struggling against the neoliberalization of the University, struggling for employment in academia and beyond, struggling for diversity within the discipline, struggling for better relationships between Universities and the communities in which they are located, and so on.

In the meantime, I think we work on doing open access as best we can, and hope that it pushes those other issues a little further along — as you say, helping to break down the hierarchies that permeate academia. And in some ways I think the fight for open access means acting beyond or outside of academia, and this is why the para-academic projects interest me so much. You and I have both been engaged in academic blogging for a while now, and it has been a formative aspect of my academic career — allowing me to engage with anthropologists, philosophers, and a variety of others at varying stages in their career. Figuring out ways to integrate those activities more into our formal academic lives might be a good start. I am also fascinated by para-academic publishers like Punctum Books — Eileen Joy’s commitment and stamina organizing that as well as the Babel Working Group is inspiring, but not something everyone can do. And then there are models of para-academic — or maybe extra-academic — research. Organizations like the Public Laboratory or the Institute for Community Research are doing great work, and provide great models for others interested in non-traditional research practices.

It’s possible to critique all of these activities by pointing out that they still depend, to varying degrees and in different ways, on the traditional academic structure. But we can’t really know what the academy will look like in 10 years — it could be completely dead, and growing in place of its rotting shell, a number of for-profit colleges whose only interest is their bottom line. Or it could be that some of these para-academic experiments might begin to group together and take on a life of their own — a genuine alternative to the neoliberal University. We can’t know.

RA: It is hard to know where things are going with all of this. I have no idea. But I’d rather not just stand by and watch it all happen. As Phil Ochs once said:

I can’t add my name into the fight when I’m gone,

So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

The time is now. That’s what that song is all about. I get inspired when I see people doing things differently when it comes to higher education — the folks at the Saxifrage school are doing some particularly good stuff. I like the whole idea of paring intellectual learning with the practical skills of actually making things. I also like the idea of taking underutilized spaces and turning them into alternative places for college-level learning. We need more of this kind of thinking. Along similar lines, I also find the folks at Deep Springs College very inspirational — I first heard about them on the CNN documentary Ivory Tower. Granted, Deep Springs is very, very small but I think it’s another example of thinking about college differently.

So the alternative thinking is out there. This brings me to the essay by Eileen Joy that you sent to me. That piece is just brimming with creativity and resistance to the corporatization of academia — and I love it. First, she talks about the idea of “biodiversity” in intellectual matter and media. This is a powerful point that people often gloss over in the rush to innovation and the digitalization of everything imaginable. Joy says we should not just ditch the past and push forward. Instead, we need to grab onto the old and the new in order to create the “most richly tapestried and noisy public commons we can.” We need printed books, we need articles, sure — but we also need all the various forms of illegitimate (or “bastard”) forms of communication she talks about as well. We don’t just need some trickle down knowledge economy in which the authorities (ie academics) preach to the commoners from the mountaintop. Joy advocates a “rowdy democracy,” and Open Access that means more than just allowing people to read the articles we write. For her, Open Access means that more people have the ability to use and take part in the system of publication and production itself.

Beyond all of that, I am especially drawn to Joy’s arguments about authority and prestige. Forget authority and prestige, she says. Stand up for bastard thought — for the kind of writing, communicating, and sharing that is about something more than market demand and competition. She’s openly defiant of the idea that the university should be seen as a business — and I agree with this. Hers is a call to reinvent the academy in direct opposition to the forces of “professionalization,” which reduce the intellectual project to little more than a way of measuring productivity through individual competition (in part via publications). Again, the university has to be something more than a business, she tells us. And publishing is part of that. Joy reminds us that the reason to publish, ultimately, is because we are “existentially obligated to others.” Publishing isn’t just another product. Or, it shouldn’t be. It’s about communicating, which means it’s also about building community.

US academia loves to pretend that community is still at the heart of its mission, but I have my doubts. It’s about exclusion as much as anything else, and the way the publishing system works is just one small part of it. So, getting back to something you said earlier, I think Zizek is right. The problems that Open Access is meant to address do exist at higher levels. It is a bigger fight — and that leaves us wondering what we can do in the here and now. This brings me back to our musings about publishing. We all know we need to publish to be even remotely considered for jobs. But how can we push back a bit? I think a more strident dedication to Open Access can be part of that. I am all for publishing and sharing ideas, but I think the terms in which we produce and disseminate our ideas need to be challenged.

JT: Yeah, I don’t mean to diminish our agency on the issue by calling attention to the broader issues. In fact, I think it extends our agency, while also, potentially, spreading it a little thinly (Where to start? How can anyone do it all?).

To start with, there are things that have to do directly with open access. You and I have both committed to publishing open access, if not exclusively then at every opportunity. I think that’s a great commitment, and I’d like to see more people take that chance — some can’t, some simply won’t. It would be great to get more later-career anthropologists to make that same commitment, but in addition to that, to weigh open access publication, and other forms of “outreach” more heavily in hiring and tenure considerations. Another possibility is focusing on citation practices. Lynne Bolles, for example, suggests citing women and anthropologists of color primarily as a political practice. The same could be done for open access, as long as it doesn’t detract from the politics of race and gender that she and others are working to promote. Then there’s the issue mentioned before of the lack of open access journals for publishing — if more people are going to start committing to open access publishing, these already underfunded and often struggling groups will become oversaturated. So we need to start more of them, and let the options proliferate — creating the biodiversity, as Joy points out. I personally would like to see more student-run and organized journals for students (like Imponderabilia) — that’s not just a call to students to get to work making those journals, but also a call to departments and faculty to support students in that process.

Those are some possibilities in the open access arena, but I think there’s a whole lot more we can do, too, that will not only make open access more… accessible…but also make the University a much better place in general. Things like fighting for better funding of Universities, revising hiring and tenure standards to embrace outreach, engagement, and alternative forms of publishing, and, generally, building community as you point out. I see this as a collective effort, and we all need to support one another and put in our share of the work if it’s going to amount to anything. It’s easy to fall into cynicism, particularly as a graduate student with steadily increasing debt and uncertainty about what comes after, but there is a lot being done, and change won’t happen instantly. I am guardedly optimistic that change will happen, though, and that we’ll have a better University because of it.

The idea of having your own writing style is an illusion. In fact, we learn to write by digesting the writers we love. We obsess over the elegant turns of phrase they appear to deliver effortlessly, and pore over our own drafts hoping to wrench beauty from passages that have been pummeled by angst and uncertainty. If we manage to enjoy success in writing (or really, in editing), it is generally because we have been well trained. At some point, someone made it her mission to instill in us a sense of conviction about the words we wield. We learned to appreciate the magic of authorship. But, it is easier to trace the blessed path to writerly righteousness in retrospect. Learning to write (which means learning to think and plan more carefully) can be a curious kind of training, in part because we don’t always know when it is happening. In reflecting upon my own training, I decided to dedicate this column to the person who initiated me into the anthropological guild, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

In what is perhaps my most acute memory from the first year of my PhD program in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, I was walking up the stairs toward the Haskell Hall Mezzanine, as Andrew Apter and Michel-Rolph Trouillot were on their way down. “Hey,” Andy exclaimed, “Michael Ralph—Michel Rolph: you guys have the same name.” Rolph was not amused. I can’t even put his expression into words, but it was something like, “There is little, if anything, similar between this young man and myself, at this juncture.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Rolph was mean, just that he had a very particular idea about mastery. He expected his students to adopt rigor as a crucial element of their intellectual formation. Faculty routinely speak about treating their students as friends. Rolph instead believed that training implied a clear hierarchy and series of protocols through which a student would ultimately become an expert—and ideally, one day, a master. As early as my prospective students’ weekend, someone destined to be part of my cohort had asked if Chicago faculty treated their students as equals. Rolph fielded the question and flatly told the student, “If there was no difference between you and I, there would be no reason for me to be here.” Thus, while I feel indebted to Rolph for endowing me with the conceptual framework that animates my work, I have to confess that the process of acquiring knowledge and securing feedback was part of the challenge that training entailed. As Malcolm X once said of his mentor, “I feared him…like you fear the power of the sun.” But then, Rolph’s “Introduction to Social and Cultural Analysis” (aka “Systems”) syllabus began with the fifteenth century political theorist Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. And my initiation involved a lot more fear than love—or so I thought at the time.

Rolph treated the students he mentored like Knights of the Round Table. He expected us to swing swords that we initially were barely strong enough to lift as a way to cultivate our intellectual fortitude. He assigned so much reading and placed such a high demand on our writing, and insisted so much that we clarify our arguments, that his training forced us to spend countless hours devoted to the task of becoming a better scholar. In the process, we were not simply forever changed as thinkers and writers—Rolph’s method of initiation changed our physical constitutions. Rolph’s approach to knowledge was, in this sense, monastic. His grueling work regime left me feeling like a friar in the darkened basement of a medieval castle, poring over texts. But for all the rigor he promoted and embodied, he was also the most imaginative thinker I have ever come across. In that sense, being trained by Rolph was like going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that so many of the allusions that come to mind when thinking about Rolph’s intellectual legacy emerge from the medieval period. For, he instilled in us an appreciation for both the breadth and the continuity that defines historical inquiry. After all anthropology was, for Rolph, a historical enterprise. For some anthropologists, ethnography is the only method that matters. Rolph’s approach, instead, combined history, anthropology, and critical social theory. These distinctions are, in fact, often more misleading than they are beneficial. For Rolph, what an ethnographer does is quite similar to what a historian does: scholars in both fields make use of cultural artifacts (whether as discrete objects, built structures, or texts), they conduct interviews when possible, they develop arguments concerned with the way that people navigate and negotiate social transformation. The crucial difference between an ethnographer and a historian thus becomes the question of periodization: the historian might explore transformations over several centuries, a half-century…a decade, while ethnographers strives to make sense of the way that people understand the world around them in the course of a year, or a few years.  For this reason, the context of an inquiry is always crucial to tease out.

In this regard it is telling that when Rolph assigned work from someone like Immanuel Kant, he veered away from the Critique of Moral Judgment, focusing instead on his 1798 publication, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. I imagine Rolph was trying to teach us that, in addition to the specific disciplinary trajectory of a field that we call, “Anthropology,” there is a social theory tradition available to us that has likewise been concerned with the norms, protocols, and ritual procedures through which people authorize trade compacts, establish control of territories, arrive at some sense of what they find sacred, and learn to adjudicate social difference. For Rolph, this debate about the stakes of social belonging had a long arc.

In recalling the conversations we had in class and office hours—and my favorite passages from his many books, articles, and essays—I am reminded that Rolph routinely looked to the fifteenth, rather than the nineteenth, century for his understanding of what it meant to be modern. His critique of colonialism was not merely about the transformation from slavery into colonialism and the formal acquisition of territories, but about the way that Renaissance-era notions of difference had structured European (or, what he preferred to call, “North Atlantic”) perspectives of people and polities in what is now Africa, Asia, as well as the Caribbean and Latin America. In fact, in his critique of prevailing scholarship on the origins of capital, industry, and governance, Rolph insisted the Atlantic world was where modernity had been worked out and that African people, products, and technologies had been central, rather than auxiliary, to these developments. Like his mentor Sidney Mintz, he saw in the conjuncture of finance capital—as well as in labor regimes and land allotments fitted to actuarial projections of future profit, and the vexed process through which any given polity secured diplomatic standing amongst its peers and rivals—the making of a political and economic system that would shape global trade and diplomacy for centuries to come.

If Rolph was a Renaissance man, it is because he viewed knowledge as as much sacred as it was purportedly secular. It is also because he sought to cultivate insights from an intellectual tradition that stretched back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing Thomas More and Machiavelli into conversation with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, Baron de Montesquieu, and others, as a matter of course. This was not simply Rolph’s method, but his pedagogy.

On the flip side, Rolph was a Renaissance man in the classic sense. Rolph was a historian, anthropologist, novelist, and folklorist, among other things. And, even in his creative projects, we see many of the key insights and historical themes that would animate his scholarship. And, as writing is as much about re-thinking as re-deploying, I like to think that creativity is ultimately the most urgent mandate Rolph persuaded me to abide by.